Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

the kind of education that a gentleman required and sharply criticizing

the means by which it was provided, especially the rote learning that was

almost universally endorsed. Apart from the traditional professions that

were available only to graduates, he argued, and the underlying motiva-

tion of making money that supported the whole system, young boys would

be better advised to skip school completely, as girls did at the time. ‘For

without the unique goal which is actually set before us (that is, to get rich

bymeans of jurisprudence, medicine, paedagogy, and Theology too, a goal

which does keep such disciplines respected),’ people in Montaigne’s time

would have been as uneducated as their equally successful ancestors.

Descartes similarly acknowledged ‘that law, medicine and the other

sciences bring honour and riches to those who practise them’ (vi.).

However, ‘neither the honour nor the profit that they promised were

enough to persuade me to study them. For, thank God, my situation

was not such that I had to earn a living from the sciences in order to

supplement my income’ (vi.). Descartes had a modest inheritance, and

he therefore thought that he was financially secure enough to devote his

life to addressing the fundamental questions about the sciences that had

been motivated, at least in part, by his uncritical Jesuit education.

Descartes provides a characteristically ambivalent evaluation of his early

education in which he is simultaneously both grateful and critical. He

accepts that ‘the languages learned in school are necessary in order to

understand classical texts,’ that ‘the reading of all good books is like a

conversation with the most eminent people of past centuries, who were

their authors,’ that ‘oratory has incomparable powers and attractions,’

and that ‘mathematics contains very subtle discoveries that can help very

muchto satisfy those who are curious, to facilitate all the crafts, and to

reduce human labour’ (vi.–). The only negative note to emerge when

reviewing the benefits of all the subjects he mentions, including ethics and

theology, occurs in his comments on philosophy, when he says: ‘philoso-

phy provides ways of speaking plausibly about everything, and of making

oneself admired by those who are less educated’ (vi.). Without rejecting

the Jesuits’ contribution to his development, he considered that, by the

end of his schooling, he ‘had already devoted enough time to languages

and even to reading the classics, to their stories and fables, because conver-

sation with people from other periods is like travelling....if one spends

too much time travelling, one eventually becomes a stranger to one’s own

country’ (vi.). However, the fundamental issue in his reflections – at